Falling Rule Lists

• Activity Number: 126
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 10, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Learning and Data Mining
• Author(s): Fulton Wang* and Cynthia Rudin
• Companies: and MIT
• Keywords: rule based classifier ; medical informatics

Abstract

Falling rule lists are classification models consisting of an ordered list of if-then rules, where (i) the order of rules determines which example should be classified by each rule, and (ii) the estimated probability of success decreases monotonically down the list. These kinds of rule lists are inspired by healthcare applications where patients would be stratified into risk sets and the highest at-risk patients should be considered first. We provide a Bayesian framework for learning falling rule lists that does not rely on traditional greedy decision tree learning methods.